Session Abstract

Professor Smarr's talk is entitled, "Toward A National Big Data Superhighway." Research in data-intensive fields is increasingly multi-investigator and multi-institutional, depending on ever more rapid access to ultra-large heterogeneous and widely distributed datasets. The Pacific Research Platform (PRP) is an NSF-funded research project which extends NSF-funded campus Science DMZs to a regional model, built on the CENIC/Pacific Wave backbone, establishing a science-driven high-capacity data-centric "freeway system." The PRP spans all 10 campuses of the University of California, as well as the major California private research universities, four supercomputer centers, and several universities outside California. Fifteen multi-campus data-intensive application teams, including particle physics, astronomy/astrophysics, earth sciences, biomedicine, and scalable multimedia, act as drivers of the PRP, providing feedback over the five years to the technical design staff. Over the next three years, PRP will examine sustainable methods for expanding such regional networks to a national scale.

Following the keynote presentation, the community is encouraged to continue the conversation - at Global Summit and after - about future collaborations and visions for where the broader research and education community should be investing time and resources for the next generation of infrastructure and services.

Speakers

Larry Smarr is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership, and holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in UCSD’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Before that he was the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC. Smarr carried out theoretical, observational, and computational astrophysics for 25 years, has driven the early development of foundational components of our global cyberinfrastructure, and most recently has become a pioneer in the quantified self movement. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served on the NASA Advisory Council to 4 NASA Administrators, was chair of the NASA Information Technology Infrastructure Committee and the NSF Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, and for 8 years he was a member of the NIH Advisory Committee to the NIH Director, serving 3 directors. He received his PhD in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin and spent three years as a Harvard Junior Fellow. Smarr can be followed on Twitter (@lsmarr) or on his portal http://lsmarr.calit2.net/.